Rundle: carbon tax a monument to Labor, and testimony to a burial

Tony Abbott and the Coalition are currently leading by 10-14 points 2PP, a lead that hasn’t changed for the best part of a year. Their triumph is easy to explain: the government narrowly won a second term by promising not to introduce a carbon tax, and was then obliged by two newly elected Green and independent Green supporters to do so, as the price of a coalition. The deal won them three years of government and may damn them for a decade hence.

Other factors have helped — their farcical handling of the refugee issue, the leaderlessness of a government now composed entirely of needy apparatchiks — but the carbon tax appears to have sunk them. Paradoxically, it will be their historical triumph; if a post-Labor Senate can lock it in, then it will be, for the Gillard government, a monument — and like all monuments, testimony to a burial. Such is life, and the other thing.

But this fate is a potential disaster for an organisation that for decades has been woven into the fabric of Australian life. I speak of course of News Limited. As its complementary grey pseudo-Stalinist apparatchiks watch the Coalition surge towards a victory that is, if not guaranteed, then at least theirs for the losing, the battered supplicants of Surry Hills are left with the dilemma, once expressed in the 19th century by The Spectator contemplating worker co-operatives — “but what place for Master?”

In 2007, Labor won power without the support of News Ltd. In 2010 it narrowly retained it, and the Greens surged to the level of solid third party, despite News Ltd campaigns against both that can only be described as psychotic. Now, News Ltd adds its usual shenanigans, but it isn’t the main game — the turn against Labor is based on a feeling out there, about actual things it does, unmediated by news stories.

News Ltd is feeling its aches and pains, something that can be seen from recent coverage. As the Coalition plateaued, it began a campaign for Abbott and co. to reintroduce some form of WorkChoices as a policy, to which one can only say, yes, yes, yes please. We agree entirely with this gambit. Do it tomorrow, and watch the Australian people reject it afresh. Feed the perpetual fantasy that Australians entirely assent to the economic liberal-social conservative quinella, when they never have.

Give Labor, improbably, another term. But Abbott, or his advisers, are unlikely to do it, much as they would like to. WorkChoices destroyed not merely Howard, but to a degree his memory. No Menzies II, he became instead the schmuck who lost his own seat to a female ABC journalist*.

Now, we are so thoroughly into the smooth post-political mainstream that News Ltd has discovered a problem: even its manufacture of scandal makes little difference to the atomised, partial, unsynthesisable process by which large numbers of people make up their minds when they come to vote, that activity wedged into the spaces — schools, church halls, etc — between the malls and freeways, an activity that increasingly feels like a bush-dance, some vaguely remembered and embarrassing tradition it seems important to keep up, for reasons that have been lost.

Its columnists bleat about competitive advantage, labour productivity, etc, etc, even as the Abbott coalition plots its erratic course — one in which it manages to borrow policies that should have been Labor’s, such as real paid parental leave (not Labor’s offer, of a couple of sick days in the stirrups), and rebrand them as a conservative, familialist move. They did it again on refugees, managing to beÂ hard-ass and compassionate in rejecting the Malaysian solution, a pretty miraculous move. Yes, yes, News Ltd helped, amplified, but it was the Coalition driving it.

Perhaps that’s why, in recent days, News Ltd has come to call, reminding the coalition of the role it played in earlier king making. That’s the only way to read Paul Kelly’s article today, in which he urges on the Coalition to make a political issue of … free speech, and the Bolt decision. Yeah, that would be the go. Leading by a clear margin on all fronts, they should take on a case that takes half an hour to explain to anyone who isn’t across it.

You wouldn’t want to underestimate this. Reading Kelly is like checking Konstantin Chernenko’s face, c. February 1985. Each twitch is not without significance, not least as a sign of life. The piece is an attempt to call in some old debts, but also an unmistakable sense of relevance deprivation. As News Ltd stares at years of global pressure, and perhaps global break-up, in Australia it is feeling keenly the dangers that the parliamentary inquiry into the media might provide. Critics have charged that this is a fishing expedition: it is, but teach a man to fish and you feed him for life, as the old saying has it.

The combination of UK hackgate, Bolt’s judgment, Manne’s “Bad News” and the stray moral felonies of the group are enough to tie it up for a long time, and, more importantly, feed into international fora, where Murdoch has not yet been given a 70% print media control BY A LABOR GOVERNMENT.

Kelly’s suggestion — it is the head piece of a campaign that has been under way since the Bolt judgment — is that the Coalition would entirely submit itself to the interests of News Ltd, which are simultaneously financial and ideological. And as with WorkChoices, those of us who support Labor like we support Collingwood — in failure, through clenched teeth, expecting defeat snatched from the oesophegus of victory — rejoice . Yes, please, please, assume that the Australian mainstream are as inward looking and obsessed as you are. Presume that the Vietnamese-Australians of Cabramatta, the second-generation wogs of all cities, most of whom want a stern refugee policy, etc, etc, also subscribe to the agenda of a Dutch-Australian neo-Calvinist chancer, whom even Kelly says “should not have been published”.

As with the WorkChoices campaign it fundamentally misunderstands the alignment of political enthusiasms in the mass population, the News Ltd elites having convinced themselves that they really relate to the suburbs. People who want to stop the boats, don’t buy into Bolt’s weird and creepy campaign, a cobweb of the worst of Europe, to test identity by skin-privilege; his blog readership is 100,000 dying Anglos, whom the News Ltd management live in thrall to, because (as with Fairfax) they would rather affirm their myths than succeed in a changed environment.

What keeps Australian politics interesting is that the values of the mainstream follow no easy path; in many ways nothing has changed since the sepia mutton chop days of the Harvester judgment, and the plaintive tone of News Ltd is the sound that has been heard for a century — why won’t Australians realise they would be better off as Americans, with their 25% working poor, their permanent deflation, and their dead cities, the product of free enterprise.

But the xenophobia has not changed much too, it has merely, as regards its anxieties, recalibrated — the yellow peril become queue jumpers. Yet what one can read from this is not a deep-seated xenophobia, but a random one — as long as many people are given a hate object, they will let the immigrants stream in. Paradoxically, and unavoidably, no one did more to break the back of Anglo Australia than the Howard government — the comprehensive economic immigration that occurred while boat-borne refugees were tied to a pole and whipped as a scapegoat, is a testamentÂ to the deep cynicism of the Howard-Costello centre as regards the myth they peddled to their addled periphery, and to the cruelty with which they exercised it on the few thousand victims whose lives they felt were worth the ticket.

But they succeeded admirably. It was the Howard era that cemented a multiracial, multicultural Australian (albeit one based on economic access rather than need) because it came from the other side. The Slap, especially the TV series,is a celebration of Howardism — it honours an Australia in which people can hate each other because of differences over parenting styles, rather than skin, race or who put who in which camp whenever.

Australia: radical and deeply conservative, swinging from pole to pole, simultaneously at both ends, a quantum modernity. Labor, had it the wit and the audacity, and been free of the hall-of-mirrors of polling, could have understood that. It could have inaugurated onshore processing — i.e. accepting refugees pursuing their legal rights — but been stern about the exercise of it. It could have accepted gay marriage, and the fuss would have been over in two weeks, because let’s face it, half of Australia’s conservatives would have been so busy going to their ex-lovers’ newly legal weddings they wouldn’t have had time to write column 1021 on “traditional values”.

Look at how Obama ushered in Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, as afterthought, as barely a speed bump. Whitlam did that, the dandy-poet leading the ALP, holding it together, reconciling the “trendies” with the workers, winning power and a mandate, and a social transformation. Yet, on the occasion of the Whitlam oration, PM Gillard, an unmarried childless Labor lifer, a Rubashov, with nothing outside the party, and a kitchen like Antarctica, decided to say that the Greens — which included her ex-colleagues, and more, from student politics — didn’t love their families. To which the only real response is, go back to your cold house in 2013, and see who returns your calls. I’m not the only one for whom, at that point, the ALP was over and done.

Now, the remnants of the Left of that party, like Kim Carr demand support — and begin an article on irrationalism (again in The Oz), not with right-wing climate change denialists, but with accounts of a few Greens. So the basic solidarity between the two classes that sustained modern Labor — a progressive working class, a left-liberal inner city class — is sundered, even by the last person that left people placed some hope in. To which the only response now is, f-ck you. Die in a ditch, and get back to us. The only game for the left now, electorally, is for the Greens. Take whatever seats can be had in the House, and hunker down in the Senate, preparing for the inevitable assault on its quotas, on PR, on the whole basis by which minor parties exist. Wait for the moment when they start this.

This opportunity, this crisis, was Labor’s to win, to make its own. Beyond the personal limits of the people involved was their political limits — that they are so laced into a global culture of transnational capitalist leadership — taking in free trade, the ILO, the corporations, and more beside — that they could not think outside of it, outside of the first-class lounge. But they are not alone, as the compass-spinning that passes for editorial direction at News Ltd demonstrates, as does the desperate opportunism of the Coalition.

No one has a clue what the score is — save those of us who have been suggesting that the whole global system was a crock since the early ’90s — and no one has a clue what to do. This will all hit Australia when it becomes clear that China has the same accounting practices as Greece. At which point the question of what Andrew Bolt said about who, when, will become as distant to memory as … the Rudd government …

*(Howard has emerged from the premiership leaner, fitter, younger, as everyone has observed; but he is already fading in the memory. Keating was destroyed by the ordeal and its aftermath but lives on. As Winnicott, I think, noted, if a great love does not destroy you, smash you to pieces, then you never really loved in the first place).

The issue is that Rundle is so blinded by his hatred for News Limited in general, and Andrew Bolt in particular, that he overlooks the effects that the judgement handed down has on freedom of speech.

Bolt’s article had errors which, as even Rundle observed, the Australian has identified and criticised, however he is so happy chortling at the discomfrt to Bolt that he overlooks that next time it may be him, or Phillip Adams, or some other left-wing bloviator who falls foul of the courts.

At that point I expect to hear the howls from Crikey about the threats to freedom of speech.

It seems that Rundle believes that freedom of speech is OK as long as its speech he agrees with.

Unfortunately, the interpretation of the law is a two edged sword, as likely to cut the left as the right wing of the commentariat.

typical froma whinging leftie who thinks it’s only the right that slings mud, you forget so easily the daily vilification haoward took from all sorts of media, the difference was -it was water off a quacks back -keating could never handle it and can’t now, the biggest issue is labor is on the nose -or noyse as julia would have us say

I think that Guy overstates News Limited’s opposition to Rudd in the lead-up to 2007 (and even its enthusiasm for Abbott). There has always been a very pragmatic edge to Murdoch’s strategy; of convincing the horse most likely to win the race that its fortunes are tied to a Rupert-delivered blessing. The Oz may have had a delusional edge in Howard’s dying days, but his mass-market papers had to reflect the popular mood much more.

I also worry the Greens will not be up to the challenge when the economic storms hit Australia. Their penchant for being economically “responsible” exposes the weakness of the “social justice” aspects of their platform; one based more on an ethical view of social problems than in looking to systematic and structural factors to address (c.f. their ecological critique). They have my vote without a doubt, but I fear that they will also be victims of the political fragmentation that is currently speeding up here and overseas. If we get our own mass strikes against austerity or Indignados movement taking off, it is not clear to me how the Greens will react to them: to deepen them or to be supportive but argue the main game is in Canberra.

Dear Michael James,
The judgement against Andrew Bolt will have a limited effect on freedom of speech.
It will only effect the subset of freedom of speech, “freedom to bullshit”.
In fact it will probably only effect the subset of freedom to bullshit, “freedom to bullshit to vilify people”.
And that is a good result.

…the government narrowly won a second term by promising not to introduce a carbon tax, and was then obliged by two newly elected Green and independent Green supporters to do so…

Since these glaring, and much debunked, lies are contained in the very first paragraph of this article (and you know that they are lies, Rundle), I can’t imagine that there is any merit in the rest of it. I did not read further.

Julia Gillard ruled out a carbon tax such as the Greens’ preferred option, not a market-based scheme such as the multi-party committee has now produced.

Her words were misquoted and distorted by the media to mean “No carbon reduction scheme of any sort”, and after this misinformation was sent out to the electorate the Labor vote dropped further! So Labor definitely received no electoral boost of any sort from Julia Gillard’s (or any other Labor figure’s) statements on carbon pollution reduction during that portion of the 2010 federal election campaign.

Considering that the 2010 federal election produced a hung parliament, and the minority Labor Govt was negotiated after the election with the Independent and Green MPs, it is entirely inaccurate to claim that the election was narrowly won by Labor (although Labor did indeed win the final 2PP vote) on the basis of anything said before the election.

And finally, to return to the actual makeup of the present carbon pollution reduction scheme: it is extraordinarily similar to the ETS that Labor wanted passed in 2009, and very dissimilar to the preferred option of the Greens in 2009. So the Greens have forced Labor to do very little, if anything, re AGW legislation.

Such serial inaccuracy in a so-called piece of journalism looks very much like deliberate dishonesty.

â€¦the government narrowly won a second term by promising not to introduce a carbon tax, and was then obliged by two newly elected Green and independent Green supporters to do soâ€¦

Since these glaring, and much debunked, lies are contained in the very first paragraph of this article (and you know that they are lies, Rundle), I canâ€™t imagine that there is any merit in the rest of it. I did not read further.

Julia Gillard ruled out a carbon tax such as the Greensâ€™ preferred option, not a market-based scheme such as the multi-party committee has now produced.

Her words were misquoted and distorted by the media to mean â€śNo carbon reduction scheme of any sortâ€ť, and after this misinformation was sent out to the electorate the Labor vote dropped further! So Labor definitely received no electoral boost of any sort from Julia Gillardâ€™s (or any other Labor figureâ€™s) statements on carbon pollution reduction during that portion of the 2010 federal election campaign.

Considering that the 2010 federal election produced a hung parliament, and the minority Labor Govt was negotiated after the election with the Independent and Green MPs, it is entirely inaccurate to claim that the election was narrowly won by Labor (although Labor did indeed win the final 2PP vote) on the basis of anything said before the election.

And finally, to return to the actual makeup of the present carbon pollution reduction scheme: it is extraordinarily similar to the ETS that Labor wanted passed in 2009, and very dissimilar to the preferred option of the Greens in 2009. So the Greens have forced Labor to do very little, if anything, re AGW legislation.

Such serial inaccuracy in a so-called piece of journalism looks very much like deliberate dishonesty.

Firstly - Michael James - I’ll assume you didn’t read the Rundle articles of the last few weeks saying the Bolt case WAS an attack on freedom of speech? In fact amongst your froth and spittle you didn’t actually say anything apposite to the case, just more conspiracy theories about crikey being left-wing.

Rundle - “Iâ€™m not the only one for whom, at that point, the ALP was over and done.” FFS! I was surprised when Philip Adams had a dummy spit and resigned from the Labor party over the Rudd knifing - only because I couldn’t believe he had been a member since the early 1980s when the wheels started coming off. And now to hear you say it was even later, in a trivial speech attacking the Greens, that you lost faith in Labor.
Incredible.

@ David and other posters
I completely agree. This is absolute bovine faeces and it’s very out of character of Rundle to peddle such rubbish. The whole article reads a bit like he was on some medication … or was ghost-written. Weird.

You fools!
An unmandated rabble has effectively handed control of the Australian economy to the likes of JP Morgan/Goldman Sacs or others who will administer collection of this and all the other carbon taxes and ets’s around the world as willing puppets in each failing nation state relinquish control of their economies as recommended by the trilateral local architect of this scam. Whether you believe Profesor Murry Salby or not, our sovereignty just took a nose dive.

Former partners and those who would receive global appointments for dutiful compliance rejoice !

The sooner the toxic Murdoch falls off the perch the better for democracy.

Irrespective of the half hearted motivation of Labor, the carbon tax legislation will be seen in the future as a brave forward thinking policy that put Australia (who could accurately called a nation of laggards) to the front of worldwide action. Ironically the Gillard Govt will not deserve much of the credit but will no doubt accept the legacy.

Once it has been running for 18 months, if Abbott is still opposition leader, I look forward to the mock outrage when he reneges on his promise to rescind the legislation.

Rundle: “the government narrowly won a second term by promising not to introduce a carbon tax” - Wrong! The government failed to win a second term on their package of policies. They then needed to negotiate a new set of policies to conform more closely to the electorate’s wishes, resulting in an agreement to work for carbon mitigation.

That is how democracy works. When a policy is rejected, you change it.

Suzanne I wish you would just meander off somewhere. I would think a solid injection of Greens is what this country needs. We’ve had enough of turning the country into an open cut mine.
You and your ilk seriously think Tony Abbott is a credible leader? Well, that says a lot about you doesn’t it.

well, either best article ever or psychotic bovine faeces - presuming those are mutually exclusive categories. a couple of points:

1. michael james - i wrote a piece last week arguing that people on the left really shouldnt be supporting state regulation of free speech, especially around the concept of insult.

2. carbon tax - i have no doubt Gillard was stitched up in terms of specificities, but it’s pretty clear that such ambiuguity was also intended, as a way of swinging the ‘10 election. i’m really talking about the politics, not the policy

3. Howard - if anything the article was rather complimentary to Howard, at the very least analytical, and hardly a bash

4. Misogyny (i) - it was Gillard, in the Whitlam oration, who opened the gate to judgements on ‘traditional values’ by suggesting that the Greens don’t love their families or their country. The PM can live however she likes, but a familyless Labor obsessive telling people, who have families, that they don’t love them as much as other people do, is obviously absurd and insulting - and makes yr own life fair game for judgement. Gillard’s opportunity was to lift Australian politics out of that sort of game - instead she chose to plunge us back in deeper. What’s the moral difference between Bill Heffernan calling Gillard ‘barren’, and Gillard’s suggestion that Greens are somehiw deficient in a quality we would judge as central to being human? I don’t see one - they both attack someone’s core identity in an obnoxious way.

5. Misogyny (ii) - as to the ‘female ABC journalist’ - i would have thought it obvious that the characterisation of McKew was to point out that she was pretty much the antithesis of the conservative imaginary that Howard had tried to summon up. professional woman, journalist, abc - it’s the elites, armed. Misogyny, honestly.

I also enjoyed this piece, altho like SBH my attention flagged about half way when yet more issues were introduced.

I agree that it is likely that the Coalition will win the next election. I also think it likely that Abbott will still be leading the Coalition and that therefore he is likely to be next prime minister.

But I am not convinced that Labor is likely to be consigned to opposition for a decade again. In part this is cos I doubt that Abbott would be a very good prime minister - Turnbull seems much more likely to be a successful prime minister despite his seeming to being a one person band, like Rudd.

But is is also because in 3 years time Labor will still have able, active and ambitious front benchers who wont be ashamed of their earlier government’s legacy, unlike Beazley, Crean and Latham’s attempts to encourage the electorate to forget Hawke and Keating’s legacy.

This article is a misreading of what is happening.
I bought petrol today and the man in charge made a point of saying that it really wouldn’t matter to most of us including him. It is new to me to have a service station operator volunteer an opinion about anything other than the weather or the money. The legislation today was not the end but the beginning.

Abbott’s “blood pledge” remark shows a serious misjudgement. Whose blood - how will it be shed and over what particular matter? It sounded hysterical and worrying for it almost sounds as if he is calling for a revolution.

The fact that this legislation passed without any support from News Ltd, and that Andrew Bolt’s credibility will increasingly be judged as flawed, and the media enquiry is also on, are game changers. Anyone who has watched tennis knows that the game isn’t over until the win is secured. This is a five setter not a walkover.

If Labor lose the next election I don’t believe it will be about the carbon tax; well certainly the votes they lose to the Abbot band of gangsters - but rather it’s because it has forgotten what it stands for and is seen to be what it now is a gutless replica of the Coalition.

Given that Tony Abbott has already advised us to believe his pronouncements only if they’re in writing, what are we to make of his promise to repeal the Carbon Pricing laws when in government? Anyway, shouldn’t “a pledge written in blood” be written somewhere? In blood?

Gillard’s pre election “No carbon tax” statement almost certainly changed a significant votes, from Labour to the Greens. It certainly floored me that she could be so brain dead stupid to say such a thing, given it was Krudd’s pusillanimity over his CPRS that led to his sudden and massive loss of popularity after cruising a record levels prior to that.
I would suggest that, were it not for that piece of idiocy, Labor could have won in its own right in 2010.

That’s just great Guy,so while you and all other journalists who aren’t directly doing the bidding for the extreme right neo-cons slowly get your bearings in a verbose and public fashion let’s just keep denigrating the Gillards and Obamas of the world so the extreme right can take over and do even more damage than Howard/Bush….
Yes bring on the Abbott dictatorship…what you think he will learn compassion fairness and honesty AFTER gaining government?
The indoctrination of the masses through mainstream media is far more pervasiveness than you are wise enough to see through all of your high foluting theories.
It is entirely unbalanced to be consistently nothing but critical of all of the democratically elected government’s policies and commentary and never analysing the shortcomings of the opposition.
And if and when Abbott does gain power it will be the media that is to blame,not the average jo who naively trusts all he reads as he goes about trying to keep his/her families fed and getting through each day/week!

International lecturer in Deep Geopolitics IAN R CRANE - Author, lecturer, documentary producer is coming to Australia for the first time to present an alternative viewpoint of the global financial crisis.

Former oil industry executive Mr Crane has become one of the leading authorities in deep Geopolitics, where geographical, economic, social, political, and spiritual issues conjoin.

Mr Crane has gained a great deal of respect, speaking to packed audiences throughout the UK and Europe by questioning the media and governments on their attempts to bankrupt the sovereign nations, to achieve a one world government.

He will discuss the Carbon Trading Scam, The Hijacked Green Agenda, The Peak Oil Myth, The Fracking nightmare (Coal Seam Gas)……..and more

The politicians of Australia also have difficult questions to answer, Mr Crane concluded “If Australian politicians succeed in their apparent quest to bury the country in a mounting sea of debt,
while pioneering the introduction of carbon taxes on the behalf of the world trade organisation and all the while reducing public services to minimalist levels, future generations will be condemned to
lives of economic slavery.”

Mr Crane will be presenting “The Hidden Agenda 2012” on the Gold Coast November 6th at the Gold Coast Arts Centre and Brisbane November 9th at the Bardon Conference Centre.

“…….. when they come to vote, that activity wedged into the spacesâ€‰……… that increasingly feels like a bush-dance, some vaguely remembered and embarrassing tradition it seems important to keep up, for reasons that have been lost.”

Even for myself, who has been obsessively interested in politics for the past 30 years, this is true, let alone the uninterested majority.

and then

“…So the basic solidarity between the two classes that sustained modern Laborâ€‰â€”â€‰a progressive working class, a left-liberal inner city classâ€‰â€”â€‰is sundered, even by the last person that left people placed some hope in. To which the only response now is, f-ck you. Die in a ditch, …….”

That sums up my response Guy. I now find myself totally oblivious to the future of the Labor Party, and hopeful that the Greens can at least become a major party.

Gillard and Labor have totally taken the wrong direction by considering the greens a greater enemy than the coalition. With good planning and some intelligence they could have looked forward to donkeys years in power, even if it was in coalition with the greens. Now they seem destined for nothing better than becoming a rump of the opposition forces.

A totally deserved outcome.

Mind you, Abbott deserves much worse. We shall see what comes to pass. There is potentially much that can happen before we again meet in those public places, to undertake some bygone tradition, whose meaning has been lost…………………

Dog’sB - you took the words right out of my mouth/fingers. Vale Labor, but not very much, the apparatchik cycle killed the spirit, the zombie lingers, seeking brains but not with any discernible success…

“Now, we are so thoroughly into the smooth post-political mainstream that News Ltd has discovered a problem: even its manufacture of scandal makes little difference to the atomised, partial, unsynthesisable process by which large numbers of people make up their minds when they come to vote, that activity wedged into the spacesâ€‰â€”â€‰schools, church halls, etcâ€‰â€”â€‰between the malls and freeways, an activity that increasingly feels like a bush-dance, some vaguely remembered and embarrassing tradition it seems important to keep up, for reasons that have been lost.”